American Gangster
- Автор: Коллинз Макс Аллан
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Tom Doherty Associates
- ISBN: 978-0-7653-5901-8
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «American Gangster». Краткое содержание книги:
The downstairs remained alive with the noises of a big family, but was muffled and distant up here. Up here, it was just Frank and Momma.
Of his preparations over the last week, from buying this house to furnishing it and even doing the grocery shopping, Momma’s room was Frank’s proudest hour. He ushered her into a space larger than the shack he’d grown up in, and her eyes opened wide and her jaw dropped as she took in an array of Early American furnishings that would have staggered Betsy Ross.
“This,” he said simply, “is your room.”
Momma was clearly awestruck by the splendor of it. But of all the furnishings, an old vanity table, dotted with French perfume bottles, was what drew her eyes and herself.
She stood touching the table, as if testing its reality, asking her son, “How did you...?”
“It’s not magic,” he said and found himself grinning like a fool. “It’s something I put in motion months ago, to send you for your birthday. But now that you’re up here with me? Well.”
“I don’t understand, Frank.”
“I had it made. From memory.”
She was shaking her head. “But you were five when they took it away. How could you remember it?”
“I remember.”
“It’s perfect,” she said. She gazed around the bedroom, her bedroom. “It’s all perfect.”
He said nothing, but was glowing inside.
His gray-haired momma, eyes exaggerated behind the thick glasses, said, “I’m so proud of you, son.”
He took her in his arms, and he kissed her forehead, and he swelled with the pride she’d bestowed upon him.
He had done good, hadn’t he?
The building Toback found for him was an old deconsecrated Episcopal church, long since abandoned. The city maintenance worker who let Richie in did not enter deep himself, merely stood near the door and watched the fool wading in through the debris-strewn former church.
Richie immediately liked the idea of this place, standing in the colored light filtering through stained-glass windows. God’s house, where cheating and lying and stealing wouldn’t be allowed. But he’d make it an Old Testament house of God, where judgment wasn’t forgiving.
Getting the feel of the place, acknowledging to himself that the clean-up work wouldn’t be pretty, he almost stumbled on something among the rubble: a framed photograph, the glass already broken, the wood cracked.
He bent and picked it up, and a faded photograph of a priest smiled at the Jewish cop in benediction.
Well, what the hell, Richie thought. We’ve already been blessed.
“This is the only floor we’ll be using,” Richie told the maintenance man.
9. Can’t Get Enough of That Funky Stuff
Across the river, in Newark, at a groovy little neighborhood dive with a black-dominated clientele, Richie Roberts — in a funky brown leather jacket and jeans — sat in a booth with Freddie Spearman, a scrawny-looking mustached guy with stringy brown hair whose pseudo-junkie style made him an ideal undercover cop.
“Freddie,” Richie was saying, talking louder than he’d have liked because of the jukebox blasting “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “this task force has got to be squeaky clean.”
“These are cops you’re looking for, right?” Spearman asked dryly, and sucked on his cigarette. He was so skinny he seemed to swim in his paisley shirt.
Richie grinned. “Yes. Cops who value a good bust more than a free season ticket to the Knicks.”
“ ‘Good bust,’ ” Spearman said, “in the strip joint sense?”
“All right, all right,” Richie said with a laugh, and he sipped his beer. “I don’t wanna come off as some damn Boy Scout. And these guys gotta be hard-asses to begin with. At some point on this gig, more than likely, the guns are comin’ out.”
Spearman blew a smoke ring. “Does sound like a good time.”
Richie leaned forward. “But, Freddie, you gotta understand — I’m reluctant to bring anyone in I don’t know, personally.”
“You know me, don’t you?” Spearman flicked cigarette ash onto the floor. “Well, I vouch for both Jones and Abruzzo. Stand-up guys all the way.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know but—”
Spearman held up a “stop” palm. “No ‘buts,’ Richie. We work together, Jones and Abruzzo and me. You want Ringo, you got to take Paul and George, too.”
Richie shook his head. “What about John?”
“Hell, you’re John.”
Richie laughed again. “Gimme a break... So where are they, these two stand-up guys?”
Spearman pointed over to the smoky joint’s crowded dance floor. “That’s Moses Jones. With the skinny-legs-and-all chickie.”
On the jukebox, Stevie Wonder had given over to Eric Burden and War doing “Spill the Wine.” A lanky black dude was dancing with a skinny white girl, so wild and uninhibited they might be leaving their best game in the practice gym. The dude had a serious Afro, a Fu Manchu mustache and a dark untucked shirt with collars pointed enough to put an eye out, and looked about as much like a cop as Spearman.
Which was to say, not like a cop at all.
“And that,” Spearman was saying, “is Al Abruzzo. With the big black mama.”
Abruzzo was a criminally good-looking young Italian in an untucked light blue shirt with its own eye-hazard collars; his sleeves were rolled up and some tattoos were showing, dating to his days in the military, most likely. The heavy-set gal seemed giddy having the attention of this cut-rate Marcello Mastroianni; and he was lost in the sight of her big bobbling bosoms.
Both Spearman’s buddies looked more like crooks than cops, so that was a good start. What Richie had in mind didn’t involve deep undercover, but his squad members would have to work the streets without getting made.
“Both are good with wires,” Spearman was saying. “Hooked up with good informants. They’re honest, far as it goes. And they’re fearless, farther than that. They’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done.”
Richie raised an eyebrow. “Good to hear. Anything else to recommend them?”
Spearman grinned. “Well, they’re insane. Like you, Richie. What more could you ask?”
He couldn’t think of a thing.
Spearman’s trio made the last of Richie’s fifteen Untouchables, the rest of them handpicked by the detective, not from going through endless files, but out of his own knowledge of which other cops he’d encountered over the years worth recruiting — cops who seemed motivated by putting away bad guys and not money in a safe deposit box.
So it was time to go to church — that ground floor of the former Episcopalian house of worship had been cleared of refuse but otherwise little renovated, with a loose bullpen of desks moved in, some files and lockers on the fringes and at the front of the room a folding banquet table behind which two bulletin boards loomed like big blank slates, waiting for the work of the sixteen men in this room, in the days and nights ahead, to fill them.
Morning sunlight filtered in, turned shades of burnished yellow and brown thanks to the tall stained-glass windows along one wall, filling the gutted room with amber-tinged light, and reminding everybody that God was watching.
Richie perched on the table with the bulletin boards at his back and said, “Our mandate is to make major arrests. No street guys — small potatoes are of no interest. Main course meals only, guys — suppliers, distributors.”
His latest recruits, Spearman, Jones and Abruzzo, had taken the desks in the back, like delinquent students hoping to evade the teacher’s notice. Of the entire group, these three amigos were the most disreputable-looking, which made them ideal for what would soon come.